One major concern in the tech community is the loss of privacy on the internet. With the internet being increasingly used as a site for personal activity and business, such loss is worrisome to many. Search providers store vast amounts of personal information based on your web browsing practices, which some fear could be used against them for medical discrimination or other malefic uses if the information fell into the wrong hands.

In September, Google, who is one of the largest collectors of such information, announced an initiative to make its user logs anonymous after only 9 months. Now Yahoo has one-upped Google by announcing that it will anonymize its own user data stockpile after only 90 days.

It will anonymize data on page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks anonymous as well as its user logs after the 90 day time frame. It says it will make exceptions in cases of "fraud, security and legal obligations".

Yahoo had previously been on a 13-month purge time-frame, installed July 2007. Anne Toth, Yahoo's head of privacy, saw the new move as a way to outcompete Google, while maintaining the data critical to Yahoo's business. She and Yahoo made the decision after careful review of the company's worldwide data collecting practices.

The company describes exceptions to the new policy, stating:

To protect users and our business partners, there will be some specific and limited exceptions to the anonymization policy. In order to fight fraud and preserve system security, Yahoo will retain system specific data in identifiable form for no more than 6 months -- but only for this purpose. Yahoo may have to retain data for longer periods to meet other legal obligations.

The new development offers perhaps the most compelling argument to date for users to switch from Google to Yahoo, a key development, considering that Yahoo has been losing market share to Google for much of this year

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That can mean a lot of different things, depending on what they want it to mean. Neither the article here nor the linked article really say.

Ideally, it means that queries are no longer associated with one another in any way. That's really the only way to prevent at least some poeple from being identified. If they attach a randomized ID to each set of queries (with one person having the same ID over the time period) it can still cause problems.

Remember when AOL released their search records by accident? Even with random ID's attached to the queries it was possible to get at least some names and SSN out of the data.

quote: The new development offers perhaps the most compelling argument to date for users to switch from Google to Yahoo

Is it really a big deal to many people what anyone does with their search results?

I figure people who care about search anonymity are those who are performing searches that are potentially incriminating. But a search warrant delivered eliminates that "protection" completely. So, this facet being eliminated, what's the point in getting worked up if someone has your searches correlated to your IP address?

I personally couldn't care less - and certainly not enough to convince me to switch from Google to Yahoo for six months' improved anonymity!

"One major concern in the tech community is the loss of privacy on the internet. With the internet being increasingly used as a site for personal activity and business..."

I'm more concerned with Google's and Yahoo's 'legitimate' usage of their data, selling to the highest bidder, so-to-speak. (Also, there have been several well reported losses of some gov't-collected data, but that is a different issue)

Business? What has this to do, really, with the overall article? If the 'business' done is not done over secure connections, well 'just desserts' as far as I'm concerned. 'Foisted on one's own petard' also comes to mind...

Well, I'm apparently less paranoid about the so-called privacy concerns with Google and other search engines tracking what I've searched. In general, if you make any assumptions at all about me based on what queries have been submitted from my IP, you're likely to be far off the mark.

That said, I don't grasp the benefit to anyone of a search engine tracking search data over any significant period of time. If you want to show me ads on the result page based on what I just searched for, fine. But if you're correlating today's search for ethanol fuel with last month's search for corncob art to show me ads for farm equipment, you're just wasting the advertiser's money.

Here's a thought, give me two search buttons to choose from: 1)Search with random ads, 2)Search with correlated ads. I'll let you know if there's even a remote possibility I might be interested in buying something.

As long as it takes the judicial system and investigators to actually get the warrants and orders needed to get any of these providers from releasing this information, anything longer than 90 days will be gone so that limits the online evidence unless they got the order shortly after the arrest. Of course as many times the arrest is made 3-6 months after the crime was committed, that makes the 90 days a mute point.